Re: FW: Bank Databases
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:02:58 -0600
Message-ID: <4FE9EB42.7090201_at_gmail.com>
On 26/06/2012 9:38 AM, Dennis Williams wrote:
> List,
> Just a small curiosity on my part. Since most banks started decades, I
> would have assumed that the heart of the banking operations would be IBM
> mainframes (running custom COBOL code). I realize that over the years new
> applications will have been added that may include Unix, Oracle, etc.
>
Over those decades, technology, and cost of maintaining that technology, has changed. Many banks have said "the x-teen millions in annual support for a 1980's host computer needs to be reduced" and some have even looked at the cost of hiring Cobol programmers who need to maintain the code during the evaluation. Banks are always looking at ways to keep ongoing costs to a minimum, including replacing nearly everything.
I get called in fairly regularly to teach Oracle's Identity Management and Oracle's 3-tier solutions (WebLogic Server, ADF, etc.) to banks who have converted (or are in process of converting) from legacy environments. And for databases, Oracle's "consistent read" and "readers don't block writers, and vice versa" stories are pretty compelling in a large multi-user-concurrency environment.
Competition being what it is, even stodgy old banks need to provide new services that can not be handled in the legacy environments. Admittedly, basic ledger and basic balance techniques tend not to have changed much over the past 400 years, but the technology to implement those techniques has moved a smidgeon. (Reporting ... not that is a cat of a different colour.)
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Tue Jun 26 2012 - 12:02:58 CDT